Wednesday, September 4, 2013

The Pretty Purple Farmhouse....

okay, every industry has its abbreviated language: i teach 'euro lit' and my colleague teaches 'poly sci'; we all question the availability of 'wyfi' without blinking. so why should anyone's abbreviations sound funny? except when my lovely therapist, knowing i'm in a bad slump in my depression, kindly puts in calls to her psychopharmacology colleagues so i can get more effective meds. "so if you get a call from psychopharm,' she tells my machine, 'that's what it'll be about.'' and indeed she has managed to get me an appointment for tomorrow morning. but of course it's my ear that takes in her phone message, so tomorrow i go to........psycho-farm! the image has me giggling almost out of my depression. of course, my mind could pick up orwellian implications, but thankfully it doesn't, and tomorrow i shall frolic with the lambs and goats and sweet-faced cows, and watch the does eat oats and mares eat oats and little lambs eat ivy.....so maybe there's hope after all..............

3 comments:

Too great, Karen. PSYCHOFARM!!!!! Can I join you at that Utopia where all of us human psychos are being healed by farm animal therapists? I've had my ups and downs with human therapists, but I've actually never tried a cow therapist, a chicken therapist (insert your own jokes here), or a sheep therapist. But I do have to note that Napoleon, the pig leader in ANIMAL FARM, was not an especially humane therapist.

On a more serious note--and without any comment on anyone's intentions--the jargon and abbreviations of any profession, subculture, or other kind of association inevitably foster an "in-group" vs."out-group" dynamic that has a genuinely negative impact on some of the "outsiders."